In a previous post, I presented a shot of my wife, Wendi, that we submitted to Molly’s Daily Kiss Sinful Sunday photo blog. As any photographer or model will tell you, when you’re shooting for a couple of hours with multiple costume and set changes, you always come away with at least a few great shots.   Here I present to you the ‘Rest of the Story’.  Included at the end are a couple of “just for the hell of it” shots. They’re all technically work safe, but I wouldn’t push it with most HR departments. So click on the MORE button and enjoy.
Over on one of my favorite blogs; Molly’s Daily Kiss, they have a photo link list called Sinful Sundays. Each week there’s a new theme presented and then a guest author picks their favorites.
I haven’t participated in one of Molly’s themes in way too long so I asked Wendi (my much prettier half) if she’d pose for it. She was delighted and spent most of the day playing with cloth and clothes and lingerie and all the other fun things that go into a shoot like this. More photos from the shoot soon. This one’s for Sinful Sunday.
Click on the lips at the bottom to go to Molly’s Daily Kiss for links to the rest of the participant’s posts. Enjoy
What started as a simple lighting test to experiment with lighting angles, fabric textures and skin textures or muscle highlights ended up becoming a much more intense shoot than planned. As you’ll see from the images below the fold, the look is intense, textured, detailed and appears to have a fairly complex lighting setup.
What i used, however, is anything but complex. I used two speedlights inside 30 inch softboxes with radio slaves. For most shots they were set to 1/8 power and set perpendicular to and about 6 inches from the wall and about 3 feet from the model. They’re above the model’s head and tilted down to give a good wash of light over her body and still throw a soft hightligh on the wall.  Because they’re softboxes insted of grids, i got a good highlight on the chains and cloth as well.
I would have preferred either larger softboxes or stip boxes to give me a fully parallel light rather than the downward cast light I have now. However, sofboxes large enough (72 or 80 inch would be perfect) would not have fit in the space we shot in and strip boxes that tall would have been almost as unwieldy and not given me the wash on the wall that I ended up liking very much.
The sescret to the complexity of the scenes is in the textures and contrast of the intricate cloth, the way it’s draped and the contrast with the wall behind it. The mix of hard chain with the soft silk of the cloth is mirrored in the intense textures in the model’s skin. Even the smooth skin of the lower back has an unusually pronounced texture.
I’ve included a quick snap of the light and prop setup that shows the space we were shooting in (my bedroom, in this instance). So jump into the comments and tell me how you’d shoot something like this or if this inspired you to shoot something, post it somewhere then come back here and etell us about it.
The images below are not safe for work. The nudity is mostly implied, but it bondage and eroticism isn’t implied, it’s right out in the open for anyone to seel.
Jessica posed for an impromptu shoot with a fantastic iridescent spider web covered fabric back in 2009.  Only a couple of these shots ever saw the light of day until now.  She had no makeup, no hair styling, just her and the drape in front of a white wall.
Over the ensuing six years, my editing skills have improved significantly so I thought I’d see what I can do with them now.  This gallery is the result.  Enjoy.
These are the cooling towers for one of the nuclear power stations in Tennessee. I think this was the Watts Bar station, though we passed not far from the Sequoyah station during that same trip in 2011.
While random-surfing through various comp-sci sites looking for something vaguely photography or graphics focused that would also satisfy the programmer in me, I came across a series of articles from the 90s about synthetic lighting.  The premise is that you separate out each light source in a scene, including a shot of ONLY ambient light in order to allow you to do neat things with the lighting in post.  Reconstructing lighting in a physical scene within a digital scene, alterations of light levels, colors, intensities, etc… even creating ‘negative’ lights that subtract light from a scene.   All of this is the bread-n-butter for 3D artists, mainly because their entire world is synthetic.  However, for photographers it’s a bit more complicated.
After reading several papers and blog posts about it, I decided to try my hand at a simple demonstration of the technique.  What I did was take a static object and shoot three shots of it.  One ambient, one with a strobe on the left, and one with a strobe on the right.  Then, using some photoshop magic, created an interesting synthetic lighting setup that let me do somethign I could only have done with gels and a lot more fiddling with light levels.
Rather than talk about, let’s get down to the fun. Get your camera out, take an ambient shot and a shot with each of two lights individually lighting the same object. LOCK DOWN the camera, lights and object. You’ll be compositing all three shots together a couple of times during all of this. Everything has to line up perfectly.
With every shoot I do, I make an effort to revisit the shoot after some time has passed in order to look at the shots with a fresh eye. Â I’ll also do this after developing a new technique or just to experiment and see if I can come up with anything neat or show worthy.
I added quite a few images to the gallery of my low-key experiment shoot with Corrie back in January. Â Some of the new images are, in my opinion, my best low-key work to date, though there is one stunning high-key image included. Â I just can’t seem to get away from bright lights and hard shadows.
So, sit back and enjoy the show. Â I’d love to hear from all of you with comments, criticisms, suggestions or anything else you want to say or ask.
The gallery is behind the cut because, as you should already expect from me, they’re Not Safe For Work (NSFW).
I shot this lovely lady mid last year in a relatively impromptu session. We had a hell of a lot of fun and talked about another session. Â Life, as it does, gets in the way sometimes and it took until April of this year to get back together for another evening of fun and photos.
Rather than go on and on about this beautiful, vibrant and awesome woman, I’ll let the photos speak for me. Â Enjoy.
My step-niece, Kerstin is about 2-3 weeks from unleashing the next generation upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world. May the gods have mercy on us all.
